It is exceedingly rare that politicians speak clear and unadorned truth, especially today when elected officials rely on slick p.r. advisors and "professional" diplomats in their foreign ministries to crank out "balanced", and "even-handed", i.e., self-serving and often-cowardly policy-statements. Hence Stephen Harper's speech before the Israeli Knesset, and the world, today is truly remarkable: a politician speaking truth out of principle to the nation that invented "speaking truth to power", and to the world which so often subordinates speech to power. When an elected official does this, despite the quickly expressed negative criticisms and condemnations not only of many in Israel's sad and vicious region, but also in the United Nations, among some Western nations, and even in the political opposition in his own country, he is not a politician, but a statesman, even a prophet.
The Canadian Prime Minister clearly noted the real issues confronting the Jewish state: unending antagonism on the part of both Arab dictatorships and West European democracies, the vile record of antisemitism leading to the Holocaust (and his own country's "none is too many" policy for Jewish refugees) and resurfacing today as "anti-Zionism", absurd "apartheid" analogies and calls for "BDS", Palestinian opposition to real peace and ongoing terrorism, the terrible moral and political hypocrisy of the UN, and the US-led coalition's dangerous appeasement of Iran on the key nuclear issue which–once again–threatens the Jewish state's very existence.
Politicians come and go, as do political parties and governments. Indeed, Stephen Harper's Conservatives may well be defeated in the next, increasingly-impending Canadian election. But when, disregarding politics, he says that embattled democratic Israel is a "great example to the world", that the Jewish state's story, despite suffering and horror, has been to "move beyond resentment and build a most extraordinary society"…one that so values life that, "overcoming the collective memory of death and persecution [it] will sometimes release a thousand criminals and terrorists to save one of [its] own"–he speaks not for the moment, but for the ages.
Stephen Harper's historic Jerusalem appearance, and his prophetic words there, will long endure: "Justice, Justice, thou shalt pursue", says the Biblical prophet, and we here in Canada should be proud that our Prime Minister's courageous words and deeds embody this call, and that they are now, as the ancient Greek historian said, a possession for all time.
(Prof. Frederick Krantz, Director of the Canadian Institute
for Jewish Research, is editor of the Isranet Briefings)
